Marc Boix, a Morella farmer, explains that on Wednesday he hired a tanker truck to unload a tank of water on his farm. The price is about 70 euros per hour of work and this week it was an hour and a half to unload approximately 17,000 liters of water with which to deal with the lack of rainfall, a critical situation that exists in the Valencian Community as well as in other territories of Spain.
"We will try to hold on, but if it doesn't rain from June we will have to allocate a week a month to this work and spend 700 euros a day to supply ourselves with water," calculates the farmer, who foresees a "very difficult and dangerous" summer for the livestock, which also lacks grass due to the lack of rain. The straw and foliage that they try to collect in other territories is scarce, such as Bajo Aragón, where there are irrigated areas and it is still easy to find.
There is only one positive aspect of the situation: the price of meat "is selling well", which helps it to cover the costs due to the drought, such as the purchase of cereals in other territories or the displacement of tanker trucks to its farm.
But in no case is it something to be happy about because he insists that "the fact that it does not rain affects us in a chain: the crops die, we will not have cereal and the supply of meat will be less," adds Boix, who represents the Valencian Association of Farmers (AVA-ASAJA) in the region of Els Ports, in the interior of Castellón. There are a hundred farmers in the same situation.
This association of which it is a part issued a statement yesterday assessing the conclusions of the Drought Roundtable that met yesterday in Madrid, and in which the Minister of Agriculture and Ecological Transition, Isaura Navarro, also participated. AVA-ASAJA called on the Administrations "to move from diagnosis to action to deal with the dramatic crop losses and the exorbitant cost overruns that the lack of rainfall is causing in the Valencian countryside."
They requested direct aid, tax measures, preferential lines of financing and rules that relax compliance with the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the latter request that the Government accepts, since yesterday it concluded that it will ask for "flexibility" in the application of European regulations to the European Commission in view of the difficulties in which Spanish crops find themselves due to the prolonged drought.
The central Executive recognizes that "the drought situation is serious and widespread", but warns that it affects the territories unequally. In the Valencian Community, Minister Navarro assured yesterday, there is still no "emergency situation", although she opted to ensure "fundamental investments in reuse, purification and modernization of irrigation so that the future of our agriculture is sustainable and profitable". . The water scarcity map for the month of March paints the Valencian territory as "normal" in the Júcar basin, but the Segura basin already has "pre-alert" tones.
La Unió Agrícola i Ramadera already warned of the worrisome situation this last week when it pointed out that the cereals of most of the Valencian territory are in a "dramatic situation". They quantify more than 25,000 hectares of wheat, barley, oats, rye and triticale that are in danger, as are other dryland crops, for which there is concern about how it will affect them if it does not rain in the coming months . This is the case of the vineyard, the almond tree, the olive grove or the cherry; and also in irrigated land there is concern, because although there are now reserves, they say, if it does not rain, farmers will be assuming additional costs that will complicate the economic viability of farms.
"We want it to rain, but the Administration is in the hands of establishing a National Water Pact, better infrastructure planning to store more water for when it rains and applying new technologies to these infrastructures," explain sources in the sector. Among the measures proposed by La Unió, a battery of measures to alleviate the effects of the drought, as well as a line of aid to agricultural and livestock farms with gross production losses of at least 20% of production. "The countryside needs urgent direct help, but that is even independent of the drought situation we are experiencing. There is no relief and many farms are closing." All problems.
